This photograph is from the ethnographical part of Turkestan Album, a comprehensive visual survey of Central Asia undertaken after imperial Russia assumed control of the region in the 1860s. Commissioned by General Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman (1818–82), the first governor-general of Russian Turkestan, the album is in four parts spanning six volumes: “Archaeological Part” (two volumes); “Ethnographic Part” (two volumes); “Trades Part” (one volume); and “Historical Part” (one volume). The principal compiler was Russian Orientalist Aleksandr L. Kun, who was assisted by Nikolai V. Bogaevskii. The album contains some ...

Wolfgangus Lazius is the Latinized name of Wolfgang Laz (1514–65), an Austrian humanist, historian, cartographer, and physician who produced the first set of maps of the hereditary lands of the Austrian crown. Lazius was professor of medicine on the faculty of the University of Vienna, where he was several times dean and rector. Emperor Ferdinand I appointed him his personal physician, historiographer, and adviser, as well as curator of the imperial collections. Like many 16th century scholars trained in the sciences, Lazius was drawn to the emerging art of ...

William H. Rease, born in Pennsylvania circa 1818, was the most prolific lithographer of advertising prints in Philadelphia during the 1840s and 1850s. This advertisement shows the premises on the 100 block of North Fourth Street of the bookseller, binder, and publisher Thomas Ellwood Chapman. A male patron enters the store. A small broadside hangs in the door window, bundles of fibrous material rest atop the mantle, and shelves of books are visible lining the wall. A woman in the street stands to the side of the cellar doors closely ...